Nonprofit Archive Begins Drive to Digitize Books for the Blind

A San Francisco nonprofit organization dedicated to building a digital library of historical and cultural materials is aiming to put at least a million books online in a form accessible to blind and dyslexic people, The Associated Press reports.

The Internet Archive has hired of hundreds people to scan books into its database, in multiple languages, so they can be read by programs and devices that convert text pages into speech. With an initial goal of digitizing 1 million books, the project would more than double the number of titles currently available to those unable to read a hard copy.